When you join the UC Davis Graduate School of Management’s thriving, dynamic community, you hit the ground running from orientation to graduation with a packed calendar of opportunities, many of which you’ll have a hand creating and planning. Here is just a sample of the many events and activities that UC Davis MBA students were involved in last year.

1. Building Networks: Our annual Peer-to-Pier networking event in SanFrancisco draws hundreds of students, alumni, faculty, recruiters and business leaders. Topics have included building personal and company brands, corporate social responsibility, and innovation and entrepreneurism within firms.
2. A Running Start: Students launch their UC Davis MBA experience with an intensive two-week orientation. Bonds form quickly as students explore Northern California hotspots, recreation and world-famous destinations like Napa Valley. Highlights include a challenging ropes course that builds teamwork skills. 
3. Meet Warren: Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffett has hosted more than 200 UC Davis MBA students at Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters in Omaha over the past four years. How do you thank a man who has everything? Students have volunteered at several local nonprofit organizations during the trips.
4. New Light on Careers: Alumni open their offices for Shadow Day, offering MBA students career advice and insider insight into their company’s operations, culture and opportunities. 
5. Women in Business: Our annual “UC Davis Study of California Women Business Leaders” details the presence of women at the very top of the 400 largest publicly held corporations headquartered in the state. The bottom line: The glass ceiling persists as men hold roughly nine out of every 10 top management and board positions.
6. Making a Net Impact: Net Impact uses the power of business to create positive social, environmental and economic change. Our Gold-ranked chapter has been recognized as the Trailblazing Chapter of the Year, the Best Small Chapter of the Year, and among the top four Graduate Chapters worldwide. The chapter hosts high-profile speakers, offers leadership development opportunities, sponsors courses in social entrepreneurship and sustainable business, and joins peers at the annual Net Impact conference, held last year at Cornell University.
7. Opening a World of Opportunity: The International Study Trip course opens a window to global business. After a quarter-long study of a country, students take their lessons learned on a two-week tour with site visits and executive meetings. A journey to Vietnam in 2010 included a visit to Ho Chi Minh’s tomb.
8. A Cleaner, Stronger Economy: UC Davis is taking a leadership role in spurring the innovations, ideas and intellectual capital needed to create a clean energy future for Northern California—and beyond. GSM Dean Steven Currall interviewed California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the E3 Forum on Economic Prosperity, Energy, Environment. “UC Davis doesn’t just talk about the interesting things that you develop here,” said Schwarzenegger. “You also put it on the market and you make it workable and it has such a tremendous effect.” UC Davis hosts the governor’s international Climate Change Summit 3 in November 2010.
9. Giving Back: MBA Challenge for Charity, the largest business school organization of its kind in the world, draws on the talents, energy and philanthropic efforts of students from nine top West Coast business schools in a year-long competition that culminates with a weekend of sports and games. The UC Davis chapter supports the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Sacramento and the Northern California Special Olympics.
10. Pledging Honesty and Integrity: Believing that integrity is a cornerstone of leadership, students began their MBA experience with an ethics pledge to “complete my degree with honesty and integrity” and to “hold myself and my classmates to the highest standards of honor from this day forward.” Every Daytime MBA student voluntarily signed the student-initiated declaration.
11. Business as Usual?: Showing their spirit, MBA students don boxer shorts and ties for the PRECISION Briefcase Brigade’s march in the annual UC Davis Picnic Day parade, a spirited start to the largest student-run campus open house in the world. The Brigade held its initial public offering in 1982 and has been a blue-chip entry ever since. 
12. “Sim City of the Business World”: During Orientation, Daytime MBA students team up for The Lam Research Foundation–sponsored Executive Challenge, which throws them into an intense simulation of building a business, making strategic decisions and solving tough problems in a compressed timeline.